


Here Comes a Thought

by Cerusee



Series: sons of a certain father [4]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Allusions to suicidal thoughts or behaviors, F/M, Ongoing confusion about pizza as a category of food, References to Addiction, and bad relationships I guess, friends to lovers (eventually), no graphic violence but some reference to bodily harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 10:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23849821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: This is how Stephanie and Jason fall together.
Relationships: Stephanie Brown/Jason Todd, Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake (Past)
Series: sons of a certain father [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1306319
Comments: 32
Kudos: 350





	1. Chapter 1

**One day:**

“I’ve watched this fifty-eight times tonight,” Jason said, from underneath the pillow he had mashed over his face.

“Watched?” Stephanie said, with a little grin.

“Listened to. Whatever,” Jason said, his voice still lightly muffled. “Tell her spooky, spooky skeleton scariness to come back whenever.”

“She’s busy. You’re gonna have to settle for old Steph, tonight.” Because she’d been bribed. Or promised a bribe. (Was it actually a bribe if it was just a promise? When did a bribe become a bribe? When the offer was made and accepted? After the favor was delivered? Or only after the whole thing was over, favor done and reward carried home?) 

One way or another, Cass owed Steph a sandwich.

Jason made a pained noise that almost resolved itself into ‘ _great_ ’, underneath the pillow.

“Sure you can breathe there, big guy?”

A noise something like _mmphfine_.

“So,” Stephanie Brown said, sitting down cross-legged near the window, on the carpet, because the only seating in the room was the couch, and Mr. Bigtall McLargeHuge was occupying that fully, “How long have you been this into the new wave of American children’s cartoons?”

“My therapist suggested I watch this.”

Steph clicked her tongue. “Doubtful.”

“....”

“What was that?”

Jason Todd, professional prodigal child, removed the pillow from his face. “What the fuck do you know? My therapist would tell me to tell you to go fuck yourself,” he said, clearly.

“ _Doubtful_.”

“Why, what would _your_ therapist say?”

“Well,” Steph said, who felt, in her own mind, that she was clutching a bannister railing that for once it wouldn’t be prudent to leap over just because the stairs seemed too slow, said, “I don’t have one right now, so I guess I’d just have to say ‘go fuck yourself,” on my own.”

Jason pulled the pillow back over his head, but after a short moment, he also groped blindly until his hand hit his earbuds, and then he dragged them under the pillow. A few seconds later, Steph heard the tinny sounds of Stephen Universe from underneath the pillow on Jason’s face.

_He’s not dead_ , she thought. Steph mentally upped her price for Cass, for this babysitting session.

Two sandwiches. No, _three_. Three whole twelve-inch sandwiches, Italian-style. And a giant oolong milk tea from that shop in the city that Cass loved so goddamn much.

***

**A while later:**

“Yeah, in my professional opinion, Stephanie, that’s a broken arm.”

Steph sucked in her breath, harshly, and then did it again. And again. And tried not to scream. “Yeah,” she managed through her teeth, her jaw set so hard she didn’t think it could be opened with a pry-bar. “I...got that...when the fucking bone… _came out of my fucking skin_.” Despite her best efforts, the sentence ended on a whimper that went all the way down inside her chest, and then she broke down and sobbed, holding her arm out of the way, while Jason fastened her seat belt.

The world grayed out for some time, and then she heard Jason saying, calmly, “We’re there in thirty seconds.” Steph started a countdown from thirty, and thought to herself _he’s a medical professional_ , while her whole body shivered uncontrollably and her arm was the only thing she could feel, and everything else existed in a weird, alien orbit around it. _He knows what he’s doing so I’m going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to be okay. I’m going to be okay. Please,_ please _, let me be okay._ Her countdown had run out, so she started it again. And again. And then again. 

Steph lost track of how many times she’d counted down from thirty.

“We’re here,” Jason said, although he sounded so far away, and that didn’t seem right. Stephanie whined, and opened her eyes—what hazy lights there were outside—and tried to open the passenger door of the car with her good arm.

Everything went black.

**30 hours later:**

Jason settled by Steph’s bedside, pamphlets in hand. “I have some good news and some bad news.”

“Spill,” Steph mumbled, still feeling ground down into hamburger, and barely able to say even that one word. She wondered if anyone had called her mom. Or...had anyone called anyone, after she’d dialed Jason, when no one else had picked up? She couldn’t remember much of the last twelve to fifteen hours. She didn’t like that she’d lost time.

_Try losing actual years_ , the still-living echo of Jason’s voice ran in the back of her mind, words from an old sniping session, even though he was right in front of her.

“You’re going to be in that cast for awhile,” Jason told her. “You’re going to need a lot of physical therapy to get it back up to fighting form.” He put a casual stress on the word _fighting_.

“Oh,” Steph said, and swallowed hard.

“You do want it back up to fighting form?” Jason said, studying her face closely.

“I really do,” she croaked. “Was that the bad news, or the good news?”

“Oh, that was the bad news,” Jason assured her. “The good news is you’re getting discharged today. Assuming you can round up someone to drive you home. They won’t let you leave on your own, just so you know. You just had surgery. You have some drugs in your system. If they just let you leave now, you might drive yourself into a wall, or take the wrong bus and end up in a bad neighborhood, or decide to operate heavy machinery.”

“Can you...call my mom?,” Stephanie said, and rubbed her forehead with the hand attached to the arm that still worked.

Jason didn’t _overtly_ stiffen, but Steph knew something was off, nevertheless. “I did call her,” he said. “She can’t make it right now.”

Steph closed her eyes and swallowed very hard. _Please, God. Not again. I can’t, not right now. Please_ , not another relapse, not _now_. “I thought you already gave me the bad news,” Stephanie wheezed. “Is she…”. Steph was starting to get feeling back in her arm, and it was agony. _Mom, I can’t take care of you right now! I need you to take care of me!_

“I’m sorry,” Jason said, and why did he sound so guilty. “Stephanie, it turns out your mom checked herself into rehab about two weeks ago. I don’t know why she didn’t tell you what she was doing.”

Steph clenched her eyes, and also her good hand, and said nothing, because she was boiling inside.

“I can call Tim,” Jason said. “Or…Cass?”

Steph shook her head, not even knowing why. Her arm hurt. Her throat hurt. Maybe that was displaced pain? Her chest hurt, too. She whispered, “they’re not...good at this kind of thing.”

“Stephanie…” Jason said. He was being so nice. Why wasn’t her mother ever this nice to her? God damn it.

_Want all you want; she’s not going to be there when you need her_. Steph felt the thought like a physical blow, and almost wept for it. 

“Jason,” Steph said, not meeting his eyes. “Can you please drive me home, so I can get out of here? I just had surgery and...I need a nurse.”

“Of course,” Jason said, gently.

Everything in her life hurt, except for that _of course_.

***

“How did you even find out where my mom was?” Steph asked him, hours later, as he was helping her get settled into bed. “She didn’t even tell _me_.” It’s not like they spoke every day, especially not after Steph had moved into off-campus housing closer to school, but dammit, she’d thought they’d built their relationship a little higher than _this_. “If you say Batman told you, I’m going to personally hunt him down and smack him in the face again, and this time, I won’t feel bad about it.” 

“ _Again_?” Jason said, with a wry twist to his lips that she sort of appreciated. “No, he didn’t. Not that I’d put it past him, to know it before anyone else did, and not say anything.” He sighed, and shrugged. “Your mom’s phone was going to voicemail, so I did some digging. I got contact info for one of her co-workers, who told me things she shouldn’t have, and then I got contact info for your mom’s facility, and they told me things _they_ shouldn’t have.”

“HIPPA,” Steph mumbled.

“Uh-huh. But people gossip anyway. Especially to other nurses.”

“Yeah, about _that_ ,” Steph said, feeling a murmur of deep, walnut-dark bitterness inside her. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why the hell did you ever give up your night job for _this?_ ”

Jason just looked at her. “Why _nursing_ , right? Is that what you mean?”

Steph sneered, casually. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s not to score easy access to the good stuff.”

“The good stuff?” There was a deeply ironic quality to Jason’s voice.

“Uh-huh. The stuff that makes you high. When alcohol isn’t enough? The prescription drugs, Jason.”

“I know what prescription drugs are, Stephanie.” Jason rolled his eyes at her. “Speaking of which, you’re due. Swallow this.” He handed her a glass of water and some pills, one of which was the size of small watermelon.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s your antibiotic.”

“I broke my _arm_ , I don’t need an antibiotic.”

“Remember the part where your cracked-open bone said ‘hi-hi’ to fresh air, in direct violation of the ‘bones-stay-on-the-inside’ pact of always? Take your goddamned antibiotic.”

“What are the other ones?”

“The good stuff. Because you broke the shit out of your arm. Do you remember breaking the shit out of your arm?”

Steph flashed him the bird with her good hand, making sure to waggle it in front of his face for several seconds. Then she stuck out her tongue, crammed all her pills in her mouth, and choked them down with a mighty swig of water.

“Give those a couple of minutes to kick in, okay?,” Jason said. “Can you lift this up a little? Let’s get your arm all settled,” he said, easing a firm pillow under her cast, for support. Everything still hurt like hell, but her shoulder stopped screaming at her, once the pillow was settled.

Steph grimaced at him. “It’s gonna take at least fifteen minutes for _oral_ painkillers,” she said. “Trust me, I know.”

“Come here often?” Jason said, eyebrows raised.

“My mom did,” Steph said. “Aaaallllll the time. She enjoyed the access to a _big_ prescription cabinet.” She clenched her eyes shut, and amended herself. “Or I guess she still does. Once an addict, always an addict, right?” 

_Fuck it, though, I thought she’d quit._

Jason blew a little breath out. “ _My_ mom used to use heroin.”

“Oh shit,” Steph breathed, and she’d have clapped a hand over her mouth, if she’d had one free. “I’m sorry.”

“She...was really sick. Ovarian cancer. It was...bad.” Jason blinked hard, and touched his eyes. “Shit. Never mind. Can you forget I said that? That’s not your problem.”

“If you’ve got another pill there for forgetting when you’ve been an ass, I’ll take it,” Stephanie said, and then wanted to beat her head in for the joke.

But Jason only exhaled hard, a couple of times, and shook his head. “They already invented that one, and I don’t want it, and I bet you don’t either. Try to relax, Stephanie, okay? The best thing you can do for your body right now is to get some quality sleep.”

“Hmph,” Steph _hmph_ ed. She was finally started to feel the painkillers kicking in. “Is that why you decided...not to stay in fighting form?”

“Huh?”

“To quit the business. Leave the team. Give the old...depart for better pastures…oh boy, that _is_ potent,” she said dreamily. “You didn’t tell me why you decided to be a nurse, you just got all shirty with me about it.”

“I could tell you, but you’re high, now,” Jason said. “You might not even remember it.” He smiled at her, anyway. She grinned back at him. Damn, but these pills were nice; she could barely feel the distant throb of her arm. No wonder Mom liked this so much. Feeling this good made her want to cry.

Jason pressed a tissue into her hand, and Steph realized it was because there were tears trickling down her cheeks. _Crud_. 

“I quit the night job because I _had_ to,” Jason said, so quietly Steph didn’t think she’d have heard him, if she’d been listening to anything else. “I wasn’t doing it right. I’m doing _this_ now because I couldn’t...stay…quit. And I would die if I couldn’t help people anymore. There’s more than one way to help people, okay?”

“Is there?” Steph said, softly, bitterly, on the edge of falling asleep. “Really?

Jason‘s mouth crooked. “I’ve bet my life on it.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Six months later, maybe:**

“Hot, hot, _hottest_ Mexican Abuela hot chocolate,” Jason said, handing Steph a mug that almost burned her hands. She yelped, and took the mug by its handle, shaking out her free hand.

“Did you bring this hot chocolate from darkest Peru?” she asked him.

“No, I bought it at Wegmans.” Jason said. “But you know what I _did_ pick up on the way back from Chile?”

“Is it…alcohol?”

“Yes,” Jason said, with great satisfaction. “ _Rum_. Would you like some?”

“I don’t drink,” Steph said. That wasn’t _entirely_ true, not anymore, but the automatic I-don’t-drink reflex was leftover from her teen years, when the prospect of being mentally impaired around anyone she actually knew—especially any and all family—had been a hard pass, thank you.

“Shit,” Jason sighed. “Never mind, then.”

Steph blew on her hot chocolate, and then said, boldly, hesitantly, “I— _actually_ —you know what? I think I might be okay drinking with you.”

Jason’s eyebrows flicked up and he made a _hmm_ noise and dug around until he came up with a small bottle, which he handed to her.

It was _oof_ , very alcoholic. She poured a good clip into her cup, and then handed it back to Jason, who mimicked her to an uncanny degree, and then set the bottle aside.

They mulled over their drinks for a few minutes, and then Jason said, a little bit  
abruptly, a little bit off, “So, I know that you and Tim used to be a thing.”

“That, we did,” Steph said, and took a good, long sip of her boozy chocolate.

Jason fiddled with his mug, and then a huge gulp of his own. “Is that thing...actually over?”

“Oh yeah,” Steph said. “It’s been _over_ for so long.”

“You really care about him,” Jason said, and it was and wasn’t a question.

Steph put her nose deep into her lovely, aromatic hot chocolate. Cinnamon, yum. “I’ll love Tim until the day I die. When I was pregnant and sixteen—with someone else’s baby—he stood up for me. He supported me and he went with me to all the classes, and he didn’t have to do any of that.”

“When you were _what_ —” Jason cut himself off, abruptly, and just said, unhappily, “ _Ah._ ” She was grateful that he didn’t press, although perversely, that made her mind the thought of talking about it with him less. “But you’re not still together now.”

“That, we are not.” Steph closed her eyes, tight, and felt the burn in them. She took another swig of her spiked hot chocolate, and let it trail fire down her throat. “We were always….never going to work.”

Jason made a soft, inquisitive noise in his throat. 

“Tim doesn’t actually like me,” Steph said, aching inside. “He thinks I’m hot, ‘cause I am, but he has never trusted me with jackshit, starting with his actual name—if it were up to him, I’d still be calling him ‘Robin’, I swear to God—and ending with _everything fucking else_. I don’t think _anyone_ has ever believed in me less than Tim does, and you cannot even begin to imagine how deep that bench goes.” She put down her hot chocolate, and rubbed her face, taking a tiny moment of comfort in her mug-warmed hands on eyes that suddenly felt swollen. “Our entire relationship, _all_ of it—even before we were making out, and the whole time during, and also continuously after that—the story of Tim and me was Tim telling me, repeatedly, and at length, that I wasn’t up to snuff and that I needed to shut up, go home, and leave the heroics to him and his big buddy in black.” _Or his little buddy in black, once Cass showed up._ But that was an emotional spiral for another night. “And that was when he was trying to be _nice_ to me.”

“Jesus,” Jason breathed.

“Yeah,” Steph said, and breathed out slowly through her nose, because she didn’t feel like screaming into a pillow, tonight. “I’m used to it, though. When we _were_ together, I...thought that was normal. Because that’s what guys—that’s just what _men_ do. They tell you you’re garbage, and they keep telling you that until you believe it.” She picked up her mug, took another drink, and then, feeling giddy—or was that tipsy? She had almost no tolerance for alcohol, maybe this had been a bad idea—she said, “I think they do it because it makes it easier to get you to do what they want.” 

Jason looked at her, and didn’t say anything, but there was an understanding in his eyes that sent a tiny shiver through her.

_How dare you look at me like you know who I am?_

“Anyway,” Stephanie added, quietly, dropping her gaze back to the safe haven of her own knees, and knuckling her hands harder around her hot chocolate, “We were never going to work.”

***

**you know what really sucks**

**being alone in a thought**

_What are u thinking about?  
Ur not alone_

**I want tacos :) wanna come with me to anna’s**

_It’s closed, bitch_

_Come by mine, I have like a fucking million tortillas  
we can make those cheese things_

**Quesadillas**

_Cooooooome to meeeeeeeee  
We can make pizzas on the inside_

**That’s calzones bitch**

_If you call be a bitch again I’ll take revenge  
Bitch_

**On my way  
Do you have scallions**

_No????!?_

**im buying scallions  
Let’s have thought s together and eat cheese food**

_You can just say let’s talk about our dad bitch  
Shit_

**I already screencapped that :)  
Freudian typo**

_u Bitch_

***

“Cheese coma isn’t a thing,” Steph said.

“I frigging beg to differ.” Jason threw his arms over his face. Dramatically. Everything Jason did was done dramatically. It was kind of endearing.

Steph twitched her toes, and made Jason’s head, resting on her feet, bobble with the motion. “I fried you _mushrooms_. I opened a whole can of pinto beans. I gave you _choices_ , my lovely fucker of a friend. You were the one who decided to eat four whole slabs of fried tortillas with just cheese and raw onions.”

“Scallions,” Jason mumbled.

“Why are you so fucked up tonight, anyway?”

Jason made a very deep and pained sound, and turned over so his head was buried in the couch cushions.

Steph prodded him with her now-free foot.

“I can’t hear you,” Jason said, or at least it sounded sort of like that, although he’d whined it straight down into the cushions.

Steph shoved him harder with her foot, and then, for good measure, wormed it directly under his face.

Jason jerked upright, and batted at it. “God, woman, wash your feet won’t you?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “What’s eating you? You’ve been a mess all over my kitchen, my living room, my foot, and also you’ve scorned my can of beans and my incredible fried mushrooms.”

“Your mushrooms were undercooked,” Jason informed her, and then scrubbed at his face. “It was...oh god, it’s been a shitty day, okay? I’m sorry for...” and he made a sweeping gesture that encompassed Stephanie’s entire apartment, and possibly also the entirety of Stephanie, and maybe his entirely unwarranted criticism of her cooking.

She nudged his shoulder with her own. “I accept your vague, blanket apology, and I will grant you a vague, blanket forgiveness, if you don’t clam up and leave me hanging. What gives, Jason?”

Jason threw back his head, and exhaled through his nose. “Lotta stuff in therapy today. Me, the big guy, the past.”

So, _the usual_. Most of what Jason admitted to her about things he talked about in therapy involved Jason, Batman, and the past.

Jason kept looking at the ceiling. “I was talking to Doc Ellie about...how I’ve never quite been able to figure out what…went wrong. _Before_.”

Before he’d died, he meant. At this point, Jason could go on in quite a lot of detail—depressing, but actually pretty insightful—about his life, from a variety of perspectives, after he’d come back from the dead. He still didn’t talk much about _before_. Steph had wondered for a while whether he’d been talking about it at all with his therapist, or if he’d just been choosing to keep that part to himself. She made an inquiring _oh?_ sort of noise.

“I used to be Robin, you know,” Jason said, so very quietly. “And then...I wasn’t.”

“ _Jason_. You were never _just_ Robin,” Steph said. “Yeah, you’re not Robin, any more, but you’re alive anyway, because you’re _you_ , you’re _Jason_.”

Jason made a face. “I’m aware.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands again, and said, “Sorry. I know what you mean. But that’s not what _I_ meant. I meant, me and Bruce, and yeah, me, Robin, and Batman...like, it was the best time in my _whole life_ , Steph, I’d never felt so useful, and so….so loved, and so wanted.” He wiped his eyes, not trying to pretend that he wasn’t crying. “And then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t do anything right. We were fighting all the time, and every thing I did was suddenly too reckless or too aggressive, and...fuck, Steph, did I ever tell you that _Alfred_ told Bruce I shouldn’t be Robin any more?”

Steph shook her head, her hand pressed over her mouth in a futile attempt to mask her own full-body shudder. Oh thank god, Jason was looking at the wall and not at her. She knew this story. She _hated_ this story; it was her story.

“It’s...part of why I ran away.” Jason shut his eyes. “It was stupid, but so was I, you know? I didn’t know who I was, if—if my family didn’t believe in me, if I couldn’t do the only thing I’d ever done that was worth anything. I went looking for the only lifeline I thought I had, after I got fired, and, hah, _that_ got me killed. I keep thinking about that, and I keep trying to figure out _what went wrong?_ Because I still don’t know.”

Steph couldn’t hold back the sob forcing its way out of her throat, and Jason, bless his lovely face, came surging up out of his own misery, and took her hands. “Steph? What’s wrong?”

“Aw _fuck_ ,” she said. “Do you know how much you and I have in common?”

There was a small silence. Then, Jason said, in a low voice, “I know you...also used to be Robin.”

“Yeah,” Steph said, hating the wobble in her voice. “I also _used_ to be Robin.”

***

They’d both had more of Jason’s smuggled rum that’d he’d left in her kitchen, months ago, than either of them should have, when Steph asked Jason, “Did you ever consider asking Bruce to...maybe sit in on a session?”

“ _Hah_ ,” Jason said. “He’d never. He doesn’t do that.”

“Did you ever ask?”

Jason didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and she thought he’d just fallen asleep on her, when he got up, grimacing at her, and disappeared into the next room. Steph willed with all her non-existent telepathy for Jason to put Bruce on speaker, but he didn’t.

Ten minutes later, Jason came out, wilted into the couch, and draped his arm over his face. The gesture was so familiar to her by now that Steph thought she could have identified Jason’s elbow just from looking at a plaster cast of it, out of a whole sea of elbows. Elbows in casts. His had this little dent on the inside of it, and it was so cute that sometimes she wanted to kiss it.

“What?” Steph said, blinking the thought away. “What happened?”

“I asked him,” Jason said.

“And?”

“Bruce said he’ll come.”

“Oh wow,” Steph breathed. “That’s...so cool. Good for him.”

“Would _you?_ ”

“What?” She bit her tongue, not sure how this had turned around on her. 

“Would you ever…have a therapy session with Bruce in tow?”

Steph considered it for a microsecond, or maybe even a whole second, accounting for mental drag from the rum, before she lied to Jason. “Nah,” she said. “It was...a really shitty part of my life. But it’s over. I don’t wanna dwell.”

_I would literally rather gouge both my own eyes out than ever let that man know how badly he broke me._


	3. Chapter 3

**Sometime later:**

“Hey,” Steph said, after waiting an entire three seconds to answer the call, pretending like she hadn’t been sitting there, staring obsessively at her phone, waiting for this for half a day. “What up?”

“ _Are you busy?_ ”

“Nothing I can’t put off,” she said, eyeing her unfinished term paper. She hadn’t touched it in four hours, why start now. “Do you feel like, uh, talking?” _About talking with Bruce?_

“God _no. The last thing I feel like right now is more fucking_ talking,” Jason said, with a little edge to his voice. And then he blew out a noisy breath, “ _Shit, sorry. That session was a lot. I need to do some processing. But I’ve been sitting here like, marinating in my own brain for a couple of hours, and I just don’t want to be alone right now. Help?_ ” He sounded simultaneously wired and exhausted.

“I’m heading over to yours,” Steph told him, pulling the door closed behind her; she’d started putting on her sneakers right after she’d picked up the call, before she’d texted Babs to tell Cass she was on her own for Diamond District duty tonight. “Want I should pick up anything on the way? Rocky road, pizza, mini-pizzas, pizza rolls—”

“ _No_ ,” Jason said. “ _Just you._ ”

A tall order. But a minute later, as she was starting the engine in her car, he texted _maybe grab some calzones tho_ , and she laughed out loud, and her chest eased slightly.

When she got there, twenty-five minutes later, they ate their way through four whole calzones, (florentine-style, with chicken, $.50 extra per), with Steph providing a steady supply of brainless chit-chat in between bites while Jason committed himself wholly to his pizza-on-the-inside. Eventually, after they’d abandoned the greasy styrofoam clamshells and the half-empty marinara mini-tubs in Jason’s otherwise ridiculously clean kitchen, and retreated to his couch—which was so much less comfortable for this kind of wallowing than hers was—Jason laid his head back against the top of the couch, looked at the ceiling, and after a quiet while with their shoulders touching, he started to talk.

***

**And later:**

They’d settled on a bench, on a river walk on the north side of the Finger, while they watched the sun set. The air was cooling unusually fast, and Steph crossed her fingers it was just an unseasonal chill, and not a by-product of someone’s argument with Mr. Freeze, or Poison Ivy being unusually thermometrically creative, or, God forbid, Swamp Thing coming back to town.

Steph furtively licked a spot on her wrist, where she’d missed a dried spot of chili, dripped down from their food truck-fiesta not half an hour ago.

Jason pulled out a single-use hand-wipe packet and handed it over to her, wordlessly.

Stephanie winced slightly, and took it, and wiped her hands and wrists clean. “Thanks. How the hell did you ever…like, _before…_ ” She spiralled a hand in the air.

“I was grimy,” Jason said, scrunching his nose. “Alfred said I smelled pretty bad, when I first got to the Manor.”

“He did _not._ ”

“He absolutely did. He was marginally nicer about it than how I just said,” Jason said. “I _did_ actually smell like garbage at the time, though.” He made a face. “I’d gotten used to it—it was just my life, by then. And then suddenly I had my own _bathroom_. You can’t imagine.”

“S’pose not,” Steph breathed.

“It was...nice,” Jason said, and went quiet.

“I’m _glad_ ,” Steph said. The thought of Jason struggling, completely alone, before he’d found his home, made her maybe-sort-of-kind-of-emo-as-shit, and kind of angry, too. “I’m glad you had that.”

“Steph,” Jason said, still quiet, still emo. “I just…thank you. I love you.”

“I know,” she said, and tried not to let her pulse go too hard. “I love you, too.”

***

They watched the sun set, while Steph snugged her head under Jason’s jaw, and secretly imagined turning her face up to kiss it, which she’d been thinking about doing for a couple of months now, and would in a heartbeat, if he ever gave her a sure sign he’d be interested in being kissed. It was such a _nice_ jawline, straight as a bowline, except for the little dents she’d been cataloging in her head.

Jason sighed, and laid his head on hers. Was he surreptitiously smelling her hair, or was that just wishful thinking?

“Hey Jason,” she murmured, and groped until she had his hand in hers, and leaned back into him a little more, for the warmth and solidity he brought her. “I’ve been thinking about changing my major to pre-med.”

He went almost still behind her, and there was a kind of wariness in his voice when he said “Oh yeah?”

“More than one way to help people, right?,” Steph said. “I’m not going to go out of fighting form, okay; I’m too good at it. And I like it too much. But…this…” she held out her left arm, and made a fist; flexed it, watched her own muscles move under the skin, and looked at the mess of scars atop it. “I almost lost the ability to do this. It’s _amazing_ , that I can still do this. And I've been thinking...I could learn how to fix broken things, if I tried.” She traced the pinprick scars of her surgical staples, intertwined with the scars from where the shattered bone had pierced through muscle and skin, and from the surgical incision, made to put the bone back where it belonged, and hold everything in place until it healed. "I know how to take people apart. There's a time and place for that. But people also need to be put back together."

“They do,” Jason sighed, and his breath on her neck made her skin warm and prickly.

“Well, anyway,” she said, and _oh_ that was a lovely shivery feeling, she’d missed that, she wanted more of it; “I don’t think it’s either/or. Or…is it? Am I crazy?”

Jason made a considering sort of _mmmph_ noise, and said “I don’t know. Maybe?” He wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her close, and she settled her arms on his, and leaned back, and thought _mine, mine; whatever this is, it’s mine_. 

“God, though, I hope you try,” Jason said. And then he said, “You know, your hair smells nice.”

“Does it?” And there went her heart again, speeding up, speeding off, high on hope.

“Yeah. Your hair... _always_ smells really nice, Steph.”

Steph’s face split open into a grin, and she closed her eyes, even though Jason couldn’t possibly see it above her.

_Now there’s a thought._


End file.
